301–310 of 638 posts
The reason why Nvidia is buying now does not have to do anything with Arc or GPU competition. There are mainly two reasons. 1) This year, Intel, TSMC, and Samsung announced their latest factories' yields. Intel was the earliest, with 18A, while Samsung was the most recent. TSMC yieled above 60%, Intel below 60%, and Samsung around 50% (but Samsung's tech is basically a generation ahead and technically more precise),…
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But what they've completely resisted so far is any non trivial modification. They turned down Acorn about the 286, which led to Acorn creating the Arm, they have turned down various console makers, they turned down Apple on the iPhone, and so on. In all cases they thought the opportunities were beneath them. Intel has always been too much about what they want to sell you, not what you need. That worked for them when…
Intel’s test for new business ideas has always been: will it make $1B in the first year? It leads to mistakes like you mention, where a new market segment or new entrant is not a sure thing. And then it leads to mistakes like Larrabee and Optane where they talk themselves into overconfidence (“obviously this is a great product, we wouldn’t be doing it if it wasn’t guaranteed to make $1B in the first year”). It is ver…
Sounds like they will someday soon.
There will always be giant, faraway GPU supercomputer clusters to train models. But the future of inference (where the model fits) is local to the CPU.
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The US government is itself a major shareholder in Intel, and has every incentive to push Intel stock over its competitors. It's almost a certainty that Nvidia was forced into this deal by the government as well. We are way beyond regulation here.
What happens now if one of these companies implodes? does it pull everything with it?
This is a death blow to the Intel GPU+AI efforts and should not be allowed by the regulators. It is clear that Intel needs the downstream, low-cost GPU market segment to have a portfolio of AI chips based on chiplets, where most defective ones end up in the consumer grade GPUs based on manufacturing yield. NVidias interest is now for Intel not to enter either the GPU market, nor the AI market - which Intel was prepar…
I don’t follow how it’s a death knell to intel AI chips. Nvidia bought shares, not a board seat. May be that’s the plan, but if you take the example of Microsoft buying apple shares that only gave apple a lifeline to build better. I do understand nvidia wants to have the whole gpu market to themselves but how will they do it?
I think the assumption there is that the strategic partnership that is part of the deal would in effect preclude Intel from aggressively competing with NVIDIA in that market, perhaps with the belief that the US governments financial stake in Intel would also lead to reduced anti-trust scrutiny of such an agreement not to compete.
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> they have turned down various console makers The problem is, console manufacturers know precisely how much of their product they anticipate to sell, and it's usually a lot . The PlayStation 5 is 80 million units so far. And at that scale, the console manufacturers want to squeeze every vendor as hard as they can... and Intel didn't see the need to engage in a bidding war with AMD that would have given them a sizabl…
> The PlayStation 5 is 80 million units so far. 80 million in 5 years is a nothing burger as far as volume.
NVDA sold 153 million Tegra units to Nintendo in 8 years, so 1.5M units a month. That's just as comparable.
[1] https://www.servethehome.com/on-ice-lake-intel-xeon-volumes-...
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What happens now if one of these companies implodes? does it pull everything with it?
too big to fail
Nvidia's stake in Intel could have terrible consequences. First, it is in Nvidia's interest to kill Intel's Arc graphics, and that would be very bad because it is the only thing brighing GPU prices down for consumers. Second, the death of Intel graphics / Arc would be extremely bad for Linux, because Intel's approach to GPU drivers is the best for compatibility, wheras Nvidia is actively hostile to drivers on Linux.…
That would seem weird to be. Intel’s iGPUs are an incredibly good solution for their (non-glamorous) niche.
Intel’s dGPUs might be in a risky spot, though. (So… what’s new?)
Messing up Intel’s iGPUs would be a huge practical loss for, like, everyday desktop Linux folks. Tossing out their dGPUs, I don’t know if it is such a huge loss.
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>Consumer gpus are totally different products from the high end gpus now. Intel has failed on the gpu market and has effectively zero market share, so it is not actually clear there is an antitrust issue in that market. It would be nice if there was more competition but there are other players like AMD and a long tail of smaller ones I'm sorry that's just not correct. Intel is literally just getting started in the GP…
I don't know what anybody would do with such a weak card. My RTX 5090 is about 10x faster (measured by FP32 TFLOPS) and I still don't find it to be fast enough. I can't imagine using something so slow for AI/ML. Only 2.2 tokens/sec on an 8B parameter Llama model? That's slower than someone typing. I get that it's a budget card, but budget cards are supposed to at least win on a pure price/performance ratio, even with…
This is a death blow to the Intel GPU+AI efforts and should not be allowed by the regulators. It is clear that Intel needs the downstream, low-cost GPU market segment to have a portfolio of AI chips based on chiplets, where most defective ones end up in the consumer grade GPUs based on manufacturing yield. NVidias interest is now for Intel not to enter either the GPU market, nor the AI market - which Intel was prepar…
Intel doesn’t deserve anything. They deserve to disappear based on how they ran the company as a monopoly. No lessons were learned.
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But what they've completely resisted so far is any non trivial modification. They turned down Acorn about the 286, which led to Acorn creating the Arm, they have turned down various console makers, they turned down Apple on the iPhone, and so on. In all cases they thought the opportunities were beneath them. Intel has always been too much about what they want to sell you, not what you need. That worked for them when…
> they have turned down various console makers The problem is, console manufacturers know precisely how much of their product they anticipate to sell, and it's usually a lot . The PlayStation 5 is 80 million units so far. And at that scale, the console manufacturers want to squeeze every vendor as hard as they can... and Intel didn't see the need to engage in a bidding war with AMD that would have given them a sizabl…
And so that gave AMD an opening, and with that opening they got to experiment with designs, tailor a product, get experience and industrial marketshare, and they were able to continue to offer more and better products. Intel didn't just miss a mediocre business opportunity, they missed out on becoming a trusted partner for multiple generations, and they handed market to AMD that AMD used to be a better market competitor.